Books: My Life and Work

H >> Henry Ford >> My Life and Work

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When the boy thus enters life untrained, he but adds to the already
great scarcity of competent labour. Modern industry requires a degree of
ability and skill which neither early quitting of school nor long
continuance at school provides. It is true that, in order to retain the
interest of the boy and train him in handicraft, manual training
departments have been introduced in the more progressive school systems,
but even these are confessedly makeshifts because they only cater to,
without satisfying, the normal boy's creative instincts.

To meet this condition--to fulfill the boy's educational possibilities
and at the same time begin his industrial training along constructive
lines--the Henry Ford Trade School was incorporated in 1916. We do not
use the word philanthropy in connection with this effort. It grew out of
a desire to aid the boy whose circumstances compelled him to leave
school early. This desire to aid fitted in conveniently with the
necessity of providing trained tool-makers in the shops. From the
beginning we have held to three cardinal principles: first, that the boy
was to be kept a boy and not changed into a premature working-man;
second, that the academic training was to go hand in hand with the
industrial instruction; third, that the boy was to be given a sense of
pride and responsibility in his work by being trained on articles which
were to be used. He works on objects of recognized industrial worth. The
school is incorporated as a private school and is open to boys between
the ages of twelve and eighteen. It is organized on the basis of
scholarships and each boy is awarded an annual cash scholarship of four
hundred dollars at his entrance. This is gradually increased to a
maximum of six hundred dollars if his record is satisfactory.

A record of the class and shop work is kept and also of the industry the
boy displays in each. It is the marks in industry which are used in
making subsequent adjustments of his scholarship. In addition to his
scholarship each boy is given a small amount each month which must be
deposited in his savings account. This thrift fund must be left in the
bank as long as the boy remains in the school unless he is given
permission by the authorities to use it for an emergency.

One by one the problems of managing the school are being solved and
better ways of accomplishing its objects are being discovered. At the
beginning it was the custom to give the boy one third of the day in
class work and two thirds in shop work. This daily adjustment was found
to be a hindrance to progress, and now the boy takes his training in
blocks of weeks--one week in the class and two weeks in the shop.
Classes are continuous, the various groups taking their weeks in turn.

The best instructors obtainable are on the staff, and the text-book is
the Ford plant. It offers more resources for practical education than
most universities. The arithmetic lessons come in concrete shop
problems. No longer is the boy's mind tortured with the mysterious A who
can row four miles while B is rowing two. The actual processes and
actual conditions are exhibited to him--he is taught to observe. Cities
are no longer black specks on maps and continents are not just pages of
a book. The shop shipments to Singapore, the shop receipts of material
from Africa and South America are shown to him, and the world becomes an
inhabited planet instead of a coloured globe on the teacher's desk. In
physics and chemistry the industrial plant provides a laboratory in
which theory becomes practice and the lesson becomes actual experience.
Suppose the action of a pump is being taught. The teacher explains the
parts and their functions, answers questions, and then they all troop
away to the engine rooms to see a great pump. The school has a regular
factory workshop with the finest equipment. The boys work up from one
machine to the next. They work solely on parts or articles needed by the
company, but our needs are so vast that this list comprehends nearly
everything. The inspected work is purchased by the Ford Motor Company,
and, of course, the work that does not pass inspection is a loss to the
school.

The boys who have progressed furthest do fine micrometer work, and they
do every operation with a clear understanding of the purposes and
principles involved. They repair their own machines; they learn how to
take care of themselves around machinery; they study pattern-making and
in clean, well-lighted rooms with their instructors they lay the
foundation for successful careers.

When they graduate, places are always open for them in the shops at good
wages. The social and moral well-being of the boys is given an
unobtrusive care. The supervision is not of authority but of friendly
interest. The home conditions of every boy are pretty well known, and
his tendencies are observed. And no attempt is made to coddle him. No
attempt is made to render him namby-pamby. One day when two boys came to
the point of a fight, they were not lectured on the wickedness of
fighting. They were counseled to make up their differences in a better
way, but when, boy-like, they preferred the more primitive mode of
settlement, they were given gloves and made to fight it out in a corner
of the shop. The only prohibition laid upon them was that they were to
finish it there, and not to be caught fighting outside the shop. The
result was a short encounter and--friendship.

They are handled as boys; their better boyish instincts are encouraged;
and when one sees them in the shops and classes one cannot easily miss
the light of dawning mastery in their eyes. They have a sense of
"belonging." They feel they are doing something worth while. They learn
readily and eagerly because they are learning the things which every
active boy wants to learn and about which he is constantly asking
questions that none of his home-folks can answer.

Beginning with six boys the school now has two hundred and is possessed
of so practical a system that it may expand to seven hundred. It began
with a deficit, but as it is one of my basic ideas that anything worth
while in itself can be made self-sustaining, it has so developed its
processes that it is now paying its way.

We have been able to let the boy have his boyhood. These boys learn to
be workmen but they do not forget how to be boys. That is of the first
importance. They earn from 19 to 35 cents an hour--which is more than
they could earn as boys in the sort of job open to a youngster. They can
better help support their families by staying in school than by going
out to work. When they are through, they have a good general education,
the beginning of a technical education, and they are so skilled as
workmen that they can earn wages which will give them the liberty to
continue their education if they like. If they do not want more
education, they have at least the skill to command high wages anywhere.
They do not have to go into our factories; most of them do because they
do not know where better jobs are to be had--we want all our jobs to be
good for the men who take them. But there is no string tied to the boys.
They have earned their own way and are under obligations to no one.
There is no charity. The place pays for itself.

The Ford Hospital is being worked out on somewhat similar lines, but
because of the interruption of the war--when it was given to the
Government and became General Hospital No. 36, housing some fifteen
hundred patients--the work has not yet advanced to the point of
absolutely definite results. I did not deliberately set out to build
this hospital. It began in 1914 as the Detroit General Hospital and was
designed to be erected by popular subscription. With others, I made a
subscription, and the building began. Long before the first buildings
were done, the funds became exhausted and I was asked to make another
subscription. I refused because I thought that the managers should have
known how much the building was going to cost before they started. And
that sort of a beginning did not give great confidence as to how the
place would be managed after it was finished. However, I did offer to
take the whole hospital, paying back all the subscriptions that had been
made. This was accomplished, and we were going forward with the work
when, on August 1, 1918, the whole institution was turned over to the
Government. It was returned to us in October, 1919, and on the tenth day
of November of the same year the first private patient was admitted.

The hospital is on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit and the plot embraces
twenty acres, so that there will be ample room for expansion. It is our
thought to extend the facilities as they justify themselves. The
original design of the hospital has been quite abandoned and we have
endeavoured to work out a new kind of hospital, both in design and
management. There are plenty of hospitals for the rich. There are plenty
of hospitals for the poor. There are no hospitals for those who can
afford to pay only a moderate amount and yet desire to pay without a
feeling that they are recipients of charity. It has been taken for
granted that a hospital cannot both serve and be self-supporting--that
it has to be either an institution kept going by private contributions
or pass into the class of private sanitariums managed for profit. This
hospital is designed to be self-supporting--to give a maximum of service
at a minimum of cost and without the slightest colouring of charity.

In the new buildings that we have erected there are no wards. All of the
rooms are private and each one is provided with a bath. The rooms--which
are in groups of twenty-four--are all identical in size, in fittings,
and in furnishings. There is no choice of rooms. It is planned that
there shall be no choice of anything within the hospital. Every patient
is on an equal footing with every other patient.

It is not at all certain whether hospitals as they are now managed exist
for patients or for doctors. I am not unmindful of the large amount of
time which a capable physician or surgeon gives to charity, but also I
am not convinced that the fees of surgeons should be regulated according
to the wealth of the patient, and I am entirely convinced that what is
known as "professional etiquette" is a curse to mankind and to the
development of medicine. Diagnosis is not very much developed. I should
not care to be among the proprietors of a hospital in which every step
had not been taken to insure that the patients were being treated for
what actually was the matter with them, instead of for something that
one doctor had decided they had. Professional etiquette makes it very
difficult for a wrong diagnosis to be corrected. The consulting
physician, unless he be a man of great tact, will not change a diagnosis
or a treatment unless the physician who has called him in is in thorough
agreement, and then if a change be made, it is usually without the
knowledge of the patient. There seems to be a notion that a patient, and
especially when in a hospital, becomes the property of the doctor. A
conscientious practitioner does not exploit the patient. A less
conscientious one does. Many physicians seem to regard the sustaining of
their own diagnoses as of as great moment as the recovery of the
patient.

It has been an aim of our hospital to cut away from all of these
practices and to put the interest of the patient first. Therefore, it is
what is known as a "closed" hospital. All of the physicians and all of
the nurses are employed by the year and they can have no practice
outside of the hospital. Including the interns, twenty-one physicians
and surgeons are on the staff. These men have been selected with great
care and they are paid salaries that amount to at least as much as they
would ordinarily earn in successful private practice. They have, none of
them, any financial interest whatsoever in any patient, and a patient
may not be treated by a doctor from the outside. We gladly acknowledge
the place and the use of the family physician. We do not seek to
supplant him. We take the case where he leaves off, and return the
patient as quickly as possible. Our system makes it undesirable for us
to keep patients longer than necessary--we do not need that kind of
business. And we will share with the family physician our knowledge of
the case, but while the patient is in the hospital we assume full
responsibility. It is "closed" to outside physicians' practice, though
it is not closed to our cooperation with any family physician who
desires it.

The admission of a patient is interesting. The incoming patient is first
examined by the senior physician and then is routed for examination
through three, four, or whatever number of doctors seems necessary. This
routing takes place regardless of what the patient came to the hospital
for, because, as we are gradually learning, it is the complete health
rather than a single ailment which is important. Each of the doctors
makes a complete examination, and each sends in his written findings to
the head physician without any opportunity whatsoever to consult with
any of the other examining physicians. At least three, and sometimes six
or seven, absolutely complete and absolutely independent diagnoses are
thus in the hands of the head of the hospital. They constitute a
complete record of the case. These precautions are taken in order to
insure, within the limits of present-day knowledge, a correct diagnosis.

At the present time, there are about six hundred beds available. Every
patient pays according to a fixed schedule that includes the hospital
room, board, medical and surgical attendance, and nursing. There are no
extras. There are no private nurses. If a case requires more attention
than the nurses assigned to the wing can give, then another nurse is put
on, but without any additional expense to the patient. This, however, is
rarely necessary because the patients are grouped according to the
amount of nursing that they will need. There may be one nurse for two
patients, or one nurse for five patients, as the type of cases may
require. No one nurse ever has more than seven patients to care for, and
because of the arrangements it is easily possible for a nurse to care
for seven patients who are not desperately ill. In the ordinary hospital
the nurses must make many useless steps. More of their time is spent in
walking than in caring for the patient. This hospital is designed to
save steps. Each floor is complete in itself, and just as in the
factories we have tried to eliminate the necessity for waste motion, so
have we also tried to eliminate waste motion in the hospital. The charge
to patients for a room, nursing, and medical attendance is $4.50 a day.
This will be lowered as the size of the hospital increases. The charge
for a major operation is $125. The charge for minor operations is
according to a fixed scale. All of the charges are tentative. The
hospital has a cost system just like a factory. The charges will be
regulated to make ends just meet.

There seems to be no good reason why the experiment should not be
successful. Its success is purely a matter of management and
mathematics. The same kind of management which permits a factory to give
the fullest service will permit a hospital to give the fullest service,
and at a price so low as to be within the reach of everyone. The only
difference between hospital and factory accounting is that I do not
expect the hospital to return a profit; we do expect it to cover
depreciation. The investment in this hospital to date is about
$9,000,000.

If we can get away from charity, the funds that now go into charitable
enterprises can be turned to furthering production--to making goods
cheaply and in great plenty. And then we shall not only be removing the
burden of taxes from the community and freeing men but also we can be
adding to the general wealth. We leave for private interest too many
things we ought to do for ourselves as a collective interest. We need
more constructive thinking in public service. We need a kind of
"universal training" in economic facts. The over-reaching ambitions of
speculative capital, as well as the unreasonable demands of
irresponsible labour, are due to ignorance of the economic basis of
life. Nobody can get more out of life than life can produce--yet nearly
everybody thinks he can. Speculative capital wants more; labour wants
more; the source of raw material wants more; and the purchasing public
wants more. A family knows that it cannot live beyond its income; even
the children know that. But the public never seems to learn that it
cannot live beyond its income--have more than it produces.

In clearing out the need for charity we must keep in mind not only the
economic facts of existence, but also that lack of knowledge of these
facts encourages fear. Banish fear and we can have self-reliance.
Charity is not present where self-reliance dwells.

Fear is the offspring of a reliance placed on something outside--on a
foreman's good-will, perhaps, on a shop's prosperity, on a market's
steadiness. That is just another way of saying that fear is the portion
of the man who acknowledges his career to be in the keeping of earthly
circumstances. Fear is the result of the body assuming ascendancy over
the soul.

The habit of failure is purely mental and is the mother of fear. This
habit gets itself fixed on men because they lack vision. They start out
to do something that reaches from A to Z. At A they fail, at B they
stumble, and at C they meet with what seems to be an insuperable
difficulty. They then cry "Beaten" and throw the whole task down. They
have not even given themselves a chance really to fail; they have not
given their vision a chance to be proved or disproved. They have simply
let themselves be beaten by the natural difficulties that attend every
kind of effort.

More men are beaten than fail. It is not wisdom they need or money, or
brilliance, or "pull," but just plain gristle and bone. This rude,
simple, primitive power which we call "stick-to-it-iveness" is the
uncrowned king of the world of endeavour. People are utterly wrong in
their slant upon things. They see the successes that men have made and
somehow they appear to be easy. But that is a world away from the facts.
It is failure that is easy. Success is always hard. A man can fail in
ease; he can succeed only by paying out all that he has and is. It is
this which makes success so pitiable a thing if it be in lines that are
not useful and uplifting.

If a man is in constant fear of the industrial situation he ought to
change his life so as not to be dependent upon it. There is always the
land, and fewer people are on the land now than ever before. If a man
lives in fear of an employer's favor changing toward him, he ought to
extricate himself from dependence on any employer. He can become his own
boss. It may be that he will be a poorer boss than the one he leaves,
and that his returns will be much less, but at least he will have rid
himself of the shadow of his pet fear, and that is worth a great deal in
money and position. Better still is for the man to come through himself
and exceed himself by getting rid of his fears in the midst of the
circumstances where his daily lot is cast. Become a freeman in the place
where you first surrendered your freedom. Win your battle where you lost
it. And you will come to see that, although there was much outside of
you that was not right, there was more inside of you that was not right.
Thus you will learn that the wrong inside of you spoils even the right
that is outside of you.

A man is still the superior being of the earth. Whatever happens, he is
still a man. Business may slacken tomorrow--he is still a man. He goes
through the changes of circumstances, as he goes through the variations
of temperature--still a man. If he can only get this thought reborn in
him, it opens new wells and mines in his own being. There is no security
outside of himself. There is no wealth outside of himself. The
elimination of fear is the bringing in of security and supply.

Let every American become steeled against coddling. Americans ought to
resent coddling. It is a drug. Stand up and stand out; let weaklings
take charity.

CHAPTER XVI

THE RAILROADS

Nothing in this country furnishes a better example of how a business may
be turned from its function of service than do the railroads. We have a
railroad problem, and much learned thought and discussion have been
devoted to the solution of that problem. Everyone is dissatisfied with
the railways. The public is dissatisfied because both the passenger and
freight rates are too high. The railroad employees are dissatisfied
because they say their wages are too low and their hours too long. The
owners of the railways are dissatisfied because it is claimed that no
adequate return is realized upon the money invested. All of the contacts
of a properly managed undertaking ought to be satisfactory. If the
public, the employees, and the owners do not find themselves better off
because of the undertaking, then there must be something very wrong
indeed with the manner in which the undertaking is carried through.

I am entirely without any disposition to pose as a railroad authority.
There may be railroad authorities, but if the service as rendered by the
American railroad to-day is the result of accumulated railway knowledge,
then I cannot say that my respect for the usefulness of that knowledge
is at all profound. I have not the slightest doubt in the world that the
active managers of the railways, the men who really do the work, are
entirely capable of conducting the railways of the country to the
satisfaction of every one, and I have equally no doubt that these active
managers have, by force of a chain of circumstances, all but ceased to
manage. And right there is the source of most of the trouble. The men
who know railroading have not been allowed to manage railroads.

In a previous chapter on finance were set forth the dangers attendant
upon the indiscriminate borrowing of money. It is inevitable that any
one who can borrow freely to cover errors of management will borrow
rather than correct the errors. Our railway managers have been
practically forced to borrow, for since the very inception of the
railways they have not been free agents. The guiding hand of the railway
has been, not the railroad man, but the banker. When railroad credit was
high, more money was to be made out of floating bond issues and
speculating in the securities than out of service to the public. A very
small fraction of the money earned by the railways has gone back into
the rehabilitation of the properties. When by skilled management the net
revenue became large enough to pay a considerable dividend upon the
stock, then that dividend was used first by the speculators on the
inside and controlling the railroad fiscal policy to boom the stock and
unload their holdings, and then to float a bond issue on the strength of
the credit gained through the earnings. When the earnings dropped or
were artificially depressed, then the speculators bought back the stock
and in the course of time staged another advance and unloading. There is
scarcely a railroad in the United States that has not been through one
or more receiverships, due to the fact that the financial interests
piled on load after load of securities until the structures grew
topheavy and fell over. Then they got in on the receiverships, made
money at the expense of gullible security holders, and started the same
old pyramiding game all over again.

The natural ally of the banker is the lawyer. Such games as have been
played on the railroads have needed expert legal advice. Lawyers, like
bankers, know absolutely nothing about business. They imagine that a
business is properly conducted if it keeps within the law or if the law
can be altered or interpreted to suit the purpose in hand. They live on
rules. The bankers took finance out of the hands of the managers. They
put in lawyers to see that the railroads violated the law only in legal
fashion, and thus grew up immense legal departments. Instead of
operating under the rules of common sense and according to
circumstances, every railroad had to operate on the advice of counsel.
Rules spread through every part of the organization. Then came the
avalanche of state and federal regulations, until to-day we find the
railways hog-tied in a mass of rules and regulations. With the lawyers
and the financiers on the inside and various state commissions on the
outside, the railway manager has little chance. That is the trouble with
the railways. Business cannot be conducted by law.

We have had the opportunity of demonstrating to ourselves what a freedom
from the banker-legal mortmain means, in our experience with the
Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railway. We bought the railway because its
right of way interfered with some of our improvements on the River
Rouge. We did not buy it as an investment, or as an adjunct to our
industries, or because of its strategic position. The extraordinarily
good situation of the railway seems to have become universally apparent
only since we bought it. That, however, is beside the point. We bought
the railway because it interfered with our plans. Then we had to do
something with it. The only thing to do was to run it as a productive
enterprise, applying to it exactly the same principles as are applied in
every department of our industries. We have as yet made no special
efforts of any kind and the railway has not been set up as a
demonstration of how every railway should be run. It is true that
applying the rule of maximum service at minimum cost has caused the
income of the road to exceed the outgo--which, for that road, represents
a most unusual condition. It has been represented that the changes we
have made--and remember they have been made simply as part of the day's
work--are peculiarly revolutionary and quite without application to
railway management in general. Personally, it would seem to me that our
little line does not differ much from the big lines. In our own work we
have always found that, if our principles were right, the area over
which they were applied did not matter. The principles that we use in
the big Highland Park plant seem to work equally well in every plant
that we establish. It has never made any difference with us whether we
multiplied what we were doing by five or five hundred. Size is only a
matter of the multiplication table, anyway.

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